Authors: Douglas Boyd
When he rode to Poitiers to enlist them in his cause, the result was by no means certain. Henry’s practice of forever playing his sons off against each other had made the Young King resent Richard and Richard hate him. In addition, Eleanor’s favourite was already so unreliable that he merited Betran de Born’s nickname for him: Richard Aye-and-Nay.
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Friends and allies never knew where they stood with him, nor with Geoffrey, who was known for being ‘as slippery as an eel’. He was now fourteen and a half, and Richard one year older. Both were regarded as adult at the time.
Eleanor listened to the Young King’s assurances of the support of so many of Louis’ vassals and allies. It seemed there would never be a better time to strike against the husband and father they had all come to hate. And if the rebellion was going to happen anyway, it was better for it to have all the support possible, including hers. So she put her considerable powers of persuasion to work to reconcile the three princes and opened her treasury for them.
Off they went to Paris, eager to overthrow the father who had manipulated them all their lives. With hindsight, Eleanor should have gone with them, but she was too proud to throw herself on the mercy of a divorced husband whom she had not seen for twenty years. So she stayed in Poitiers to brave it out in the heady atmosphere of her court, where the young gallants were cock-a-hoop at the opportunity to test military skills they had spent years acquiring.
Damning his sons for ingrates, Henry ordered all his cities and castles to be on the defensive. The uprising began on the Sunday after Easter, 15 April 1173, when all the Angevin possessions south of Normandy rose against him – from Maine and Brittany through Anjou to the south of Gascony. The earl of Leicester even landed in Suffolk with a force of Flemings said to number over 3,000. In Eleanor’s Aquitaine and Poitou, the list of rebels read like a directory of the nobility: Faye, Lusignan, Ste Maure, Aunay, Montevrault, La Guerche … and among them Geoffroi de Rancon, the ageing catalyst of her disgrace in Turkey.
Epitomising the unchivalrous nature of ‘knightly warfare’, the princes’ ally Count Philip of Flanders ordered his troops to burn and destroy
everything
and leave nothing for the enemy’s dinner.
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By fire and sword they ravaged the territory that had declared for Henry, with the exception of those places too strong to take, like the prosperous sea-girt port of La Rochelle, whose prudent burgesses sat out the conflict behind their double fortifications in the shrewd expectation that ‘the old king’ would win this war.
Realising that he could count on his supporters only so long as he held the upper hand, for few had any reason to love him, Henry recruited 20,000 mercenaries from Brabant – the area around Brussels. The coalition forces ranged against him looked impressive on paper, but they had too many chiefs. The Young King, Richard and Geoffrey lacked experience and were simply figureheads, while Louis had never been much of a general.
Most of their early attacks were directed against Normandy, substantially loyal to Henry. Gradually during the summer, he won the upper hand. Negotiations were opened at Gisors on 24 September, where he offered to share out all his possessions: Richard, for example, was to receive half the revenues from Aquitaine, in return for which Henry asked for only four castles in the duchy. Behind the princes, whose youth and inexperience might have inclined them to fall for this approach, was Louis, who had learned the hard way not to trust Angevin promises. As he explained to them, the fact that Henry was making these offers
now
was proof that the titles he had previously given them with such pomp were in name only and that he had always intended to keep the revenues from their lands for himself. Following his advice, the three princes rejected Henry’s terms.
Diplomacy and negotiation having failed, he returned to the attack stronger than before. In the south, Richard, recently knighted by Louis, was attempting to rally the Gascons, whose pugnacity was hampered by lack of a military leader to impose a coordinated strategy. They flocked to Richard’s colours less from loyalty to him than from hatred of his father.
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With a few exceptions such as La Rochelle, the whole of western France was once again a lawless wasteland of burned crops and razed castles, traversed by armed bands of looters. The Church particularly suffered.
Henry ordered Eleanor to leave Poitiers and join him, to lend her name to his side in the struggle. Penned by Peter of Blois, a letter from Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen threatened her with excommunication if she did not repent:
To the Queen of the English, from the Archbishop of Rouen and his suffragans, greetings in the cause of peace.
No Christian can fail to know that marriage is a firm and indissoluble union…. Thus, a woman is at fault if she leaves her husband and does not observe this social bond….
We know that unless you return to your husband, you will be the cause of widespread disaster. Although you alone are at fault, your
actions will bring ruin on everyone. Therefore, O illustrious queen, return to your husband and our master….
If our pleadings do not move you to do this, at least let the sufferings of the people, the threats of the Church and the desolation of the Kingdom do so. Certainly this desolation cannot be prevented by the King, but [only] by his sons and their allies. Against all women and out of childish counsel, you give offence to the lord King, to whom however powerful kings bow the neck….
Truly, you are our parishioner, as is your husband. We cannot fail to exercise justice. Either you will return to your husband, or we shall be compelled by canon law to use ecclesiastical censures against you. We say this reluctantly, but unless you come to your senses with sorrow and tears, we shall do so. Farewell.
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Being treated like some wayward wife who had left her husband on a whim, when it was Henry who had rejected and insulted her before and after John’s birth, simply stiffened Eleanor’s resolve. But one after another the rebel fortresses fell to Henry and his Brabanters: La Haye, Preuilly, Champigny and Chinon. Raoul de Faye’s treasure castle, where the taxes squeezed out of the Poitevins were held, was burned and razed to the ground. The winter of 1173/4 saw another truce concluded between Henry and Louis, to last from mid-January to Whitsun.
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Richard’s mood in Poitou during the spring of 1174 was optimistic, but when Henry’s mercenaries took Le Mans, marched through Anjou and captured Poitiers on 12 May, its titular count was on the run.
Silence descended once again on the great audience hall beside the Tour Maubergeonne, the troubadours and
jonglars
were scattered or dead, the flickering fire of southern culture blown out once again. Swallowing her pride too late, Eleanor fled to seek asylum on Louis’ territory. Riding disguised as a man with a small escort only a few leagues from safety, she was arrested by knights loyal to Henry, but the bitterest pill was to find that her whereabouts had been betrayed to them by her own trusted courtiers Guillaume Maingot, Portclie de Mauzé, Foulques de Matha and Hervé, her steward, whose names appear on so many of the charters she had drawn up during the years at Poitiers.
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There is no more dread sound than a key turning in the lock, followed by the jailer’s footsteps receding outside. That, she heard the first night, probably in the Tour du Moulin at Chinon, a bleak tower in the most inaccessible part of the castle reserved for
important hostages. Next morning she looked south from its narrow unglazed windows across the dawn mists in the valley of the Vienne towards the duchy she would not see again for many years (plate 20).
One can imagine her feelings when brought a captive before Henry, most probably in Rouen. History was full of sons who had risen up against their fathers, but all Christendom was against her as an ‘unnatural’ wife, who had stood against her husband and raised her sons in treason against him. Abandoned by her closest vassals and courtiers, she knew that if Henry won the war he would pardon the princes and continue to use them. Her only use to him lay in her lands.
With or without her treason, the pope would grant Henry an annulment if asked, for the degree of consanguinity was even closer than that which provided the spurious grounds for her divorce from Louis. However, that would involve handing back her dowry of Poitou and Aquitaine – and Henry never gave anything back, not even a son’s rejected fiancée whom he kept as his own mistress. Nor would he have her killed, unless in one of the berserker rages that betrayed his part-Viking ancestry, for then Richard would enter fully into his inheritance.
He offered her a choice: she could either abdicate her titles and take the veil at Fontevraud, or be locked up for however long it took to make her change her mind. She was fifty-two years old and Henry only thirty-nine. Refusing to give in to a man almost certain to outlive her, she was facing the prospect of the rest of her life under lock and key. But she did refuse. Poitou and Aquitaine were her identity. She had given Henry everything else, but not this. Henry was in a hurry to break her will and thus shorten the war: the conditions under which she was kept must have been hard. All she had to cling to was the hope that somehow Young Henry and Geoffrey and her beloved Richard would outwit and outfight the father they hated.
But Richard was retreating southwards – all the way to Saintes at the western end of the great east–west Roman highway across central France. His preparations for a stand there were brought to nothing by Henry’s speed of attack. Penetrating the defences through the triumphal arch of Germanicus then serving as a town gate, he took the Capitol and invested the cathedral which was serving as arsenal and food reserve. Never one to waste resources, he simply sat and waited until the defenders surrendered, swelling his depleted coffers not only by Richard’s war reserve of money, weapons and equipment
but also by no fewer than 60 ransomable knights and 400 sergeants-at-arms. However, his rebellious son was not among them, having fled to Geoffroi de Rancon’s reputedly impregnable fortress on the other side of the River Charente. Not having any available siege engines, Henry left him there and withdrew northwards with his captives after carving the duchy into six regions under military governors and rewarding Porteclie de Mauzé, leader of the barons who had betrayed Eleanor, with the office of seneschal.
A consortium of French nobles under the count of Flanders judged the time right to make an expedition across the Channel with Young Henry at their head and place him on the throne with the support of King William of Scotland while his father’s back was turned. On 8 July the Young King’s party were awaiting favourable winds at Gravelines
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when Henry defied the elements by setting sail from Barfleur on a fleet of forty vessels carrying several thousand of his Flemish mercenaries and his entire family with the exception of the three princes.
Eleanor, who had been kept incommunicado for months in various of his castles, was now in the bizarre position of sharing the same storm-tossed ship as her daughter Joanna, Prince John and Alix de Maurienne, the Young Queen Marguerite and Richard’s betrothed Alais Capet, Constance of Brittany and Emma of Anjou
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– all of whom Henry was holding hostage together with notables such as the count of Chester and the countess of Leicester, whom he would entrust to no other jailer.
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Yet however unenviable the position of Marguerite, Constance and the others, their plight was roses all the way compared with the fate Eleanor knew awaited her, once across the Channel.
Not all Henry’s English subjects preferred life under his harsh but ordered rule. To win over his enemies, he decided on an act of public penance at the shrine of Becket. After securing Marguerite, with Alais and Constance of Brittany in the castle of Devizes and Eleanor in Old Sarum,
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he travelled to Canterbury along the Pilgrims’ Way for his self-abasement at Becket’s tomb.
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On Saturday 12 June he dismounted at the West Gate of the city, donned a simple woollen pilgrim’s robe and walked barefoot through the dirt streets to the cobbled precincts of the cathedral.
Admitted to the crypt, he stripped and knelt at the saint’s tomb, to suffer three lashes from each of the eighty monks in the community.
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Gilbert Foliot was meanwhile preaching a sermon on the king’s innocence to the assembled crowd of townspeople and pilgrims.
Some of the lash-wielding monks had witnessed the murder and must have taken a personal pleasure in punishing the monarch on his knees like a naughty schoolboy for polluting their cathedral with a blood crime, as a result of which services had been suspended for a whole year until 21 December 1171 when the bishops of Exeter and Chester formally ‘reconciled’ the building. After the flagellation, Henry spent the night on his knees in the crypt before departing next morning for London, exhausted by his three-day penitential fast.
At Westminster he submitted to the cares of his physicians and valet, dressing the cuts on his feet and back, while getting an update on the rebellion. The Scots were moving south and the count of Flanders’ mercenaries had already landed in East Anglia.
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However, the mass of the Young King’s forces was still in France, awaiting calm weather for the crossing. Before the night was out, the situation had changed yet again. A messenger burst into the king’s chamber with the news that William of Scotland had been captured and was held prisoner in the castle of Richmond in Yorkshire, at which reverse his forces were melting away. Deciding this was a miracle sent to reward his penance, the king ordered all the bells of Westminster to be rung in order to waken every citizen of London to the news that God was on his side again.
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By the end of July – a mere three weeks after Henry’s return – the rebellion was over in England. With its leader, the 78-year-old duke of Norfolk, Hugh Bigod, pardoned and swearing fealty anew, the advance guard of Young Henry’s army was allowed to return to Flanders from East Anglia. Abandoning his plans for invasion, he headed for Rouen, under siege by Louis, but the result was a foregone conclusion. On 8 August Henry landed at Barfleur with the ranks of his Brabanters strengthened by 1,000 Welsh mercenaries. Their arrival to lift the siege of Rouen was so rapid that Louis at first doubted the evidence of his own eyes.